How To Get The Monkeys Out Of Your Temple

Your Body is a Temple 🙂 . It’s where you live, love, learn, dream. Sadly, you may also be sharing it with a few squatters. Yup. The monkeys.

A little incident Monday in the lobby 5 minutes (less even) before class started caught me by surprize regarding one such monkey. The incident had nothing to do with the class or practitioners. It was just life cropping up when you least expect it (at the most inconvenient time of course 🙂 ).

It brought up anger. I was caught by surprize because I hadn’t felt that one in its full fury for some time. It was powerful and strong. For a brief second it did not feel like I was ‘having’ anger, it felt more like I was anger itself I was so consumed by it. Of course Yogis feel the full range of emotions too and I always work to observe and keep the negative ones in check. It is not possible to eliminate them and I am not sure I want to or need to, they are part of what makes us human, they serve their purpose at the right time but you don’t want them being dominant/overwhelming. I know I am not anger, (nor fear, stress, tension or worry) but I was disturbed by the power of this emotional monkey, how quickly it took lead and by its toxic residue. I mulled how easy it is to nurture and feed its unpleasantness in the aftermath by dwelling about the person who made me angry (there is usually a person at the end of the anger after all !), thinking about how ‘bad’, ‘wrong’, ‘rude’ they are (rightly or wrongly this is often the case). Monkeys come in different guises, anger, fear, stress, worry, tension and for the most part they are an ‘add on’, superfluous to requirements.

Q: Why evict them? A: “Holding onto anger is like drinking poison and expecting the other person to die.” ~ Buddha
In Yoga, via the medium of asana, whether you know it or not, you work on your true Self. Your fundamental nature has strong building blocks that may have become obscured. The ‘shedding of the unnecessary’ as an effect of Yoga helps reveal and bring to fore that shiny TRUE Self. It gets more of an outing, the toxic monkeys get diminished, put in their rightful place, become dormant. You are ‘freeing’ your true nature. Perhaps now and then they poke their naughty heads up. But in my case this week it served as a good lesson for me personally and a reminder that I don’t have to identify with it/them and with asana practice I evict their effects more efficiently and revert to my baseline ‘happy/content’. I was lucky that I was about to teach because the process of teaching put me back on track so much so that by the end of class I was just philosophising with myself about it all and not ‘feeling’ it and I was considering that the trigger/person needs my compassion more than anything else.

Don’t make the mistake of identifying with that part of the lower self that manifests in the heat of the moment. Acknowledge that ongoing effort must be made to remain in charge and begin again immediately.

If a toxic monkey rears its little head

You get yourself outta that ‘bed’

To a well heated Bikram Yoga class ASAP

To HELP KEEP YOUR TEMPLE MONKEY FREE.

Om Om Om -vs- OO OO OO
In Pursuit of Stillness ~ Trisha

Nov 2013